Highlights

Customers benefit from insight provided by Apperian as well as their own deployments of New Relic® Mobile

New Relic Helps Apperian and its Customers Maximize the Value of Enterprise Mobile Apps

Founded by a former Apple executive, Apperian is the leading mobile application management (MAM®) and enterprise app store platform for the secure delivery of critical apps to users across an organization and the extended enterprise including contracted workers, sales agents, dealer networks, and franchisees. The Apperian platform has helped IT and lines of business secure and distribute more than 1.5 million enterprise mobile apps to organizations such as Maxim Integrated, NVIDIA, Nationwide, New Balance, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Environment

Apperian’s software as a service platform runs on a LAMP stack, including the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, Apache for the web frontend, and PHP, Python and JavaScript for the application. Apperian also uses Node.js, Redis, and PostgreSQL.

Enabling enterprise mobility for customers and their users

Designed specifically to get critical apps into the hands of workers who need them, Apperian’s platform is designed to deliver apps in a consumer-like way that is easy to use, manage, and scale. “We want end users to have a rewarding experience when they use our product, so that they’ll be more likely to download our customers’ applications and use them in the way the enterprise intended,” says Caleb Mills, Vice President of Operations for Apperian.

To that end, Apperian is focused on understanding how it can improve on the development and delivery of its software to maximize adoption of applications by its customers’ end users. At first, the Apperian team usedwhatever means it had to gain information about performance of the platform, but without a true application performance monitor, it was di!cult to pinpoint specific areas that needed improvement.

It was a customer request that eventually accelerated Apperian’s decision to purchase an application performance monitoring solution. “We had one customer require that we provide a monthly uptime and usage report, and we didn’t have a good way to collect those statistics at the time,” says Mills. Building the capability from scratch was dismissed and Apperian beganlooking at New Relic. The Apperian operations team immediately liked what it saw.

“New Relic is like the eyes and the ears of our operation and informs what we decide to tackle in terms of DevOps.”

Caleb Mills
Vice President of Operations, Apperian

Gaining insight into the entire infrastructure with New Relic

“I was blown away with how easy it was to get New Relic up and running,” says Mills. “Once we saw the value that we were getting out of New Relic, not just for the one customer, but for all the performance insight New Relic provides, we decided to use it everywhere.” Apperian deployed New Relic on all of its production servers. From there, the company began using New Relic on all of its quality assurance servers. That lead to adding server monitoring and the platform plug-ins, too, for a complete picture of what was happening in the Apperian infrastructure.

Today, the Apperian operations and QA teams rely on New Relic® APM™, New Relic Browser™, and New Relic Platform™ to monitor performance of the infrastructure. “With New Relic APM, we can watch transactions go through our entire stack and see exactly where problems are and provide information to our engineering group to fix them,” says Nate King, senior systems engineer at Apperian. King also appreciates the key transactions capability in New Relic: “Key transactions help us drill down to specific parts of our application that get hit on a regular basis so we can track how they’re performing and improve them.”

The QA team benefits from advanced insight into how well pre-production applications are performing, using the information to help engineering focus on problem areas. “Before we release applications for production, we run the same monitoring in QA as we do in production,” says Mills. “We know then whether or not there’s going to be any performance issues and can get ahead of the curve before we go to production.”

Other departments are getting in on the New Relic act as well. Apperian’s marketing team leverages New Relic data to inform them on geographic information, such as where customers are coming from. As for the sales team, they use New Relic data to keep an eye on performance when they are speaking with customers.

“[The partnership with New Relic is] valuable to us because we’re all about making sure that our customers and the employees at our customers have the best mobile experience possible and part of that is having a well-performing application.” Caleb Mills, Vice President of Operations, Apperian

As the use of New Relic grew within Apperian, the mobile app management and enterprise app store platform provider recognized that many of its customers also needed the level of insight into performance that New Relic provides. A partnership with New Relic could enable both customers and Apperian to work towards the same goal. “It’s important to help our customers create the best application possible,” says Caleb Mills, vice president of operations at Apperian. “Reselling New Relic Mobile supports one of our core diffierentiators: providing an excellent user experience.”

Now a New Relic partner for nearly two years, Apperian offers New Relic Mobile to customers who do not yet have insight into the performance of their mobile apps. “With New Relic Mobile, our customers can see whether an application is crashing or taking five minutes to load,” says Mills. “New Relic helps our customers create the best possible application.”

As with Apperian, once customers start using New Relic, they can continually find new use cases for the product suite. Mills explains: “One customer started using New Relic Mobile for one application, and similar to our experience, they then expanded usage to all their applications. Now New Relic is an invaluable part of their operation.”

“New Relic distills the information into one place, so we can easily look at it and not have to go digging through logs. We can identify where the problem is quickly, resolve the issue, and improve performance for our customers.”

Nate King
Senior Systems Engineer, Apperian

Becoming the eyes and ears of operations

“New Relic is like the eyes and the ears of our operation and informs what we decide to tackle in terms of DevOps,” says Mills. Mills highlights one example where the team was seeing odd application behavior. Server monitoring indicated everything was fine from the CPU, memory, and disk utilization perspective so the team decided to look at traces of specific calls. “Using New Relic, we figured out that there was a time-out happening deep within the code and it wasn’t throwing an exception,” said Mills. “It was taking two minutes to silently fail. We drilled down and had it fixed in thirty minutes. Solving this would have taken us a day and a half before New Relic.” Mills went on to say that there have been numerous other situations where New Relic saved the team considerable time in resolving issues.

Both Mills and King agree that New Relic is designed to make it easy to gain comprehensive insight into performance throughout the Apperian platform. “People are often surprised how much information they get from New Relic, just how complete a picture it gives about our application,” says Mills. King adds: “New Relic distills the information into one place, so we can easily look at it and not have to go digging through logs. We can identify where the problem is quickly, resolve the issue, and improve performance for our customers.”

Based on its internal success with New Relic, Apperian became a New Relic partner, reselling New Relic Mobile to customers who don’t have application performance monitoring for their mobile applications. Now with New Relic for Apperian’s MAM platform and New Relic for customers’ applications, Apperian can better deliver on its goal for customers and their users to have the best mobile experience possible.